May 26, 2012

In an uncompromising interview, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package. So when she studies the Greek balance sheet and demands measures she knows may mean women won't have access to a midwife when they give birth, and patients won't get life-saving drugs, and the elderly will die alone for lack of care – does she block all of that out and just look at the sums? "No, I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens." She breaks off for a pointedly meaningful pause. It sounds as if she's essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe, you've had a nice time and now it's payback time. "That's right." She nods calmly. "Yeah." And what about their children, who can't conceivably be held responsible? "Well, hey, parents are responsible, right? So parents have to pay their tax."

The Guardian, 26/5/12

"In the myth and folklore of the Near East and Europe, Gello (also Gyllou, Gylou, Gillo, etc) is one of the many names for a female demon or revenant who threatens the reproductive cycle by causing infertility, spontaneous abortion, and infant mortality. Michael Psellos says that Gello also killed pregnant women and their fetuses. Thus Gello in general blocked the cycle of reproduction. John of Damascus, in the treatise Peri strygnôn, records a belief among the "common people," still current in his day, that ghosts called gelloudes or striges flew nocturnally, slipped into houses even when the windows and doors were barred, and strangled sleeping infants. The 14th-century Greek ecclesiastical historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos said gelloudes "bring the infant from the bedroom, as if about to devour him.” Leo Allatios explicitly cross-identifies striges and gelloudes, recasting the demonic or revenant gello of Eastern tradition as the witch of Western Europe."